I searched my world but I can't find youYou're standing there but I can't touch youTry to talk but the words are just not thereI can feel a sense of dangerYou stare at me like I'm a strangerParalyzed and you don't seem to careThe demons in my dreams.•

"It's you."

He's been waiting for Rose to come out of this shop for flipping hours now. He's almost pleasantly surprised to find a league of cybermats underneath the stairs at the shopping mall. And now that that's sorted out, he's back, waiting at the door with a smile on his face, waiting for Rose to reemerge.

He turns around at the voice, though. It's an American, someone he doesn't recognize. She's small and blonde and by all accounts very pretty, but she's not someone he recognizes.

"Oh my god," she says. "It's you."

"Hello," he says, warily.

She runs towards him, stopping only a few feet from where he is. Her grin is huge and seems to split her face in two. He likes her grin, he decides in that moment. He generally does like pretty blonde women with wide grins, but he thinks he likes hers an awful lot.

"Who are you?" he asks.

Her face falls, and she looks so utterly surprised. "You've never---You've never not known me."

He hates this sort of reaction. It means that, at some point in the past, he's met her. But her past is his future and that's just too much wibbly-wobby timey-wimey for him to deal with at the moment.

He looks back into the store, where Rose is finally getting ready to leave, then back to the girl. He had planned on ice cream and a semi-romantic-but-this-really-isn't-romantic-at-all walk across the 43rd century boardwalk upstairs, not a chat with someone from his future.

"Sorry. Time's always a bit confusing for me," he says. "I'm a time traveler---"

"I know that," she says, and she sounds very put out that he thinks he has to explain himself. "I've just---"

She bites her bottom lip, and then extends her hand.

"I'm Claire," she says.

Her eyes are wide and brown and, unlike the rest of her, aren't young in the slightest. She's very old, he can tell just from her eyes. And she feels…wrong. Not wrong like Jack, the skin-crawlingly wrong Jack he ran away from back on Satellite Five, is wrong, but she's different.

He gives her hand a shake. Her fingers are warm, and he can feel time rippling around them. She's very different, but he doesn't really understand how. "I'm the Doctor---"

"I know," she says. She glances behind him, and he can only assume Rose has reappeared. He starts to back away, but Claire holds his hand firmly for one more moment.

"I never said thank you," she says. "But. Thank you."

And with that, she turns and runs away. He hears the clomp-clomp of her high heels against the holographic flooring, and watches her turn a corner and run.